Thursday, September 12, 2013

Who’s the Fairest?

Should the army pay for Bradley (aka Chelsea) Manning’s sex change therapy? If he’d been acquitted, he probably would have received a dishonorable
discharge and the responsibility for any operations would be his alone. But now
he's a prisoner who claims he’s also imprisoned in his own body. For instance,
if in the course of the approximately 7 years of the 35 year sentence he's supposed to serve, Manning had developed a chronic heart condition requiring a
bypass, the federal government would be responsible for the surgery, as they
would be for most prisoners. In any case we’ve come a long way baby. It seems
only yesterday when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) was the order of the day. Now the
army is being asked to provide female gonads for their men, in or out of the brig. Recently Chris Beck,
who had been a highly decorated Navy Seal, revealed that he too had long believed he
was a woman in a man’s body. Chris is now Kristin. She became the first Navy
Seal, to publically reveal her transgender status. What would have happened
to Chris/Kristin if she'd revealed the truth during his career? Up until recently she’d have been stripped of her medals. Bradley
Manning and Kristin Beck are two separate cases. One returns to his cell every
night, a prisoner of both the state and the self; the other a hero, is, at least in our current increasingly more tolerant culture, free to become the woman he always wanted to be. And then there are all
the men and women who have no problem with the bodies they were born into and yet
are still unhappy. In some ways, they’re the most difficult case.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.